Mark Williamson wrote:
Timwi, if you doubt the accent problem is a real one, you clearly have not heard many different accents in your life.
Firstly, you are not exactly helping your credibility by asserting to know more about my own experiences than I do.
Secondly, what is stopping speakers of various accents from speaking various articles? Just because an article has already been spoken by a Brit, doesn't exactly make it impossible for a Singaporean to contribute *their* version too, if they think the Brit is oh so incomprehensible.
Lastly, you are *definitely* not helping your credibility by asserting that an automated text-to-speech system would universally be better received than natural recordings! I can easily understand a wide range of English accents when they are spoken slowly, but I am afraid that text-to-speech systems are just painful to listen to.
I therefore highly recommend to fall back to automated text-to-speech only when a natural recording is not available.